1954 San Francisco Chronicle found under my floorboards. Ad features "The Miracle Mile" of Mission st. campl.us/jDyp—
Fred Sharples (@fredsharples) May 22, 2012

And a proper, flat scan:

For those new to Mission history, the Miracle Mile was the second biggest shopping and entertainment district after downtown as we can see via the SFPL:

1958:

1949:

While the Miracle Mile lives on above That’s It sign, the suburban flight of the 1960s changed the neighborhood dramatically, from Irish/Italian to Mexican/Central American. Drastic changes were planned for the Mission in the 1960s, including Embarcadero-style redevelopment and highway running down Capp St. Thankfully we dodged those bullets.

The ad is complete with a list of stores which were pretty easy to cross reference with the 1954 city directory, which happens to have a list of street addresses in numerical order. In the interest of history, I pulled out the relevant business listings and glommed them together. I also pulled them out as text with links to street view for future searchability. Note that the current store listing is purely Googled, so let me know in the comments if it has changed or if I got it totally wrong.

Things get interesting around 21st, so I pulled out a bunch of consecutive entries and underlined the ones in the ad. This is the block with the New Mission and Crown Theaters.

See also: See’s Candies at 2534 Mission, which is now Foreign Cinema!!

New Mission Market was there:

(Mmmm, I’m hungry for some Supreme Ravioli.)

In fact, you just can see it on the right hand side of this 1957 SFPL photo:

I do love that awesome chicken icon and that font:

More detail and some historical tidbits on the 2500 block in their 2005 Business Improvement Plan.

From 22nd St southward, lots of interesting details, so I broke out the second half of the 2600 block.

Hey, the Lucky Pork Store was indeed there since 1949!

Um, OK, I guess they liked pork stores back in the day:

And the Mission Masonic Temple is still there, jammed up next door to the Walgreens.

I’m kind of surprised by how many telephone exchange names there were, much more than just MI-Mission (64x-) and VA-Valencia (82x-). I also see UN-Underhill (86x-), HE-Hemlock (43x-) and AT-Atwater (28x-).

A few more interesting addresses I came across in the 1954 directory:

Bruno’s and Big Beef must have been mortal enemies:

Hey, look, some bars! (Wonder if Anchor had anything to do with Anchor Brewing?) Anyway, neither are bars now.

Hey look, a surf bar! I wonder what that could be today? And 2779 Mission sounds really familiar, and is making me hungry for some mysterious reason.  What could it be? It’s almost as if it will change to another bar in the 60s, and then start serving burritos a few decades later.

I’ve seen a few Ken’s Flowers signs still around. And this is one of the few Mexican restaurants I saw:

By 1954, the railway through the Mission had been shut down for over a decade, and the property largely sold off. With Railroad Grocery and Fruit, we see some historical naming for a property next to the old Southern Pacific line:

Hmm, I wonder what the 2832 Mission, “under construction,” will become? Ah, it looks to be the current site of today’s Rosamunde! Sausage on the tracks!

OK, definitely hungry now.  Comment away!

• The California Digital Newspaper Collection, a state treasure, needs your help.  The State Assembly and Senate eliminated their funding last year, and plans to do so again this year.
  
• Fill out this petition to request that funding be restored, and call your state senator and assembly member to request that the cuts to the California Newspaper Project in AB 121 be reversed in this year’s budget.
• The Senate Budget Subcommittee meets tomorrow, April 19th, and the Assembly Budget Subcommittee meets May 2nd. So call your State Senator NOW and ask that they restore funding to the California Newspaper Project.
  
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When not creating Sutro animated GIFs, I sometimes write about local history. Pretty much anything interesting I find usually comes from one of three places:

• Sanborn Maps (via David Rumsey, or the SFPL)
• old SF city directories (via the directory of directories at SF Geneology, scanned by the Internet Archive)
• the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC, UC Riverside)

The CDNC is a gold mine, a godsend, a treasured and fascinating view of a San Francisco and a California that are gone yet still with us every day. Where we work, where we live, where we eat and drink are all impacted by the people whose stories were captured by journalists and advertising from 100 years ago. These stories are brought back to life by the scans of the CDNC.

Just a few articles I’ve written that relied on the CDNC:

• Shipwrecks and captains
• Shipwrecks and beer
• Baseball (and beer)
• Valencia and 26th Street (and a bar)
• Valencia and 18th Street (and a beer garden)
• Baseball (and beer)
• The Bernal gold rush (and beer)

The amazing part is that the CDNC is free. This is by design:

“Simply put, we cannot and should not rely on commercial interests to properly digitize and protect our newspaper heritage for future generations.”

But we all know that free comes with a cost:

“The CDNC archive is immense: 20 terabytes of data and growing. All this data is being preserved on onsite and offsite servers and also with tape backups. Managing and safekeeping this archive requires a substantial investment in hardware and personnel.”

Over the past 10 years, the California State Legislature has funded this preservation of California’s history, scanning disintegrating newspapers and microfilm. Unfortunately I received this alarming note from the team at UC Riverside that runs the CDNC:

Last year Assembly Bill No. 121 (AB 121) eliminated all of the $216,000 in state funding for the California Newspaper Project.  This funding has also been eliminated from next year’s budget.

If State funding is not restored, work on preserving the remaining newspaper microfilm and digitizing state papers will come to a halt and will be difficult or impossible to fully resume again.

Please sign this petition requesting that the state resume funding for this educational resource that costs so little, yet gives so much.

Better yet, call your California State Senator and State Assembly Member and encourage them to restore funding for the California Newspaper Project (CNP) in this year’s budget that was eliminated last year in AB 121.

The Senate Budget Subcommittee meets TOMORROW, Thursday, April 19th, and the Assembly Subcommittee meets May 2nd, so contact them asap.

Here’s a crop showing household residents, ages, and the value of the house, or rent paid:

Employment information, including yearly salary:

I’m sure that other neighborhoods will be different, but this was a working-class area, and highest salary I saw was $2500 per year for the likes of cops, bakers, welders, firemen. Adjusted for inflation, this is about $40K per year. (The CPI for 1940 is about 16.)

Houses ran about $4000-$5000 for a 2-bedroom, 1-bath, and about $6000 for 3-bedroom, 2-bath. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $65-$100K which is pretty insane. Not sure on apartments, but you can figure out the percentage of salary that went into housing by looking at the rent. $25 to $35 seems typical, or about $400 to $560 in today’s dollars.

Here’s a map showing who lived in three of buildings along the 3200 block of Mission St, along with some of the census data.

(I cheated a bit and used the 1915 Sanborn map rather than the 1950 map –by 1940 few things had changed.)

Picking a name at random, Charles and Anna Lynch lived with their two girls (aged 3 and 1) at 3212 Mission, above what is now Mi Lindo Peru. They paid $27.50 each month for rent. Charles was a fireman and made $2500 a year, or $208 a month, so his rent was just 13% of his salary. I’m guessing that their landlady Philmena lived below them, along with Ed the motorman who worked for the Market St. Railroad.

Ironic footnote: 3212 Mission was the site of that fire last year.

Their next-door neighbors in 3214 were the Bamfords, originally from LA. He was a shoemaker who made $60 a month but paid $30 a month in rent.

Up the street, William Catalano, 25, his 23-year old wife Beatrice and their 5 year old son William Jr. lived in an apartment block that was torn down few decades later to make way for the Bank of America parking lot. William was a musician, working on a “music project”, pulling in $985 a year, or $82 a month, and paid $15 a month in rent.

William was a jazz drummer and a pretty kick-ass dad. How do I know that? Well, it turns out that a few years later, his son, “Billy” Catalano, picked up the trumpet in school and ended up a noted musician himself. He passed away in 2005, and his obituary was in the Chronicle.

“William “Billy” Catalano, Jr., a lyrical and passionate jazz trumpet player and teacher who performed in scores of San Francisco nightclubs and theatres and instructed thousands of young musicians in a career that spanned six decades, has died.”

Billy’s school band teacher tried to get him to play the trombone, and said that he could only play the trumpet if he supplied his own. So what did his dad do?

“The boy’s father, jazz drummer Bill Catalano, spent that night playing poker and won a silver trumpet on a turn of a card, which Billy proudly brought to school the next day.”

So, yeah, that was pretty cool random Google search.

None of these files are scanned or indexed yet, but you can most easily find your “Enumeration District” by searching at the site Steve Morse and Joel Weintraub have set up. Once you get the ED narrowed down, you can download the original census forms for that area, which will only be two or three blocks of homes, at least in San Francisco. Pro-tip: save yourself some time and just download the entire set of scanned images for your ED — the image browser is pretty hard to use.

The Catalano family is just one story. Time to start thinking about how to get the names and data onto a map to figure out some more.

Thanks to the California Digital Newspaper Collection, we can see manifests of the King Philip and other ships of the era. Here’s the manifest from 23 July 1859. Basically anything interesting came around the horn.  I don’t know what’s more surprising, the quantity or how many different things were on one ship.

Pianos. Soap. Fireworks. Rum. Whiskey. Wagons. Nails. Shoes. Books. Sheets of pig iron. Barrels of salt pork. Hops.

Speaking of hops, I am kind of surprised there is no beer on the manifest.  The King Philip sailed from Boston, so perhaps it wasn’t a big beer town?  But regardless, they certainly seemed to have everything else. (Another project would be to compare ships manifest before and after the Transcontinental Railroad made it through in 1869.  But I digress.)

Now, I know you are thinking, “But man cannot live on barrels of whiskey and rum alone!  One needs a good beer on occasion!”  Thankfully porter and ale were shipped from London in great volumes.

For reference, “HHDS” is a hogshead, which was about 63 gallons, which is 63 * 128  = 8064 oz, or the equivalent of 672 bottles (times 100).  So the Southern Eagle carried the equivalent of over 11,ooo six-packs across the Atlantic, around the horn, up the Pacific to San Francisco. (It also carried coal, pig iron, wine, champagne, and port.)

I’m still surprised at how much beer was shipped in to town given there were at least a dozen breweries  as we can see from the 1859 city directory in the Herrick/Hoogs San Francisco Almanac:

Just to show you how quickly things were growing in this era, the 1859 Langley directory shows says there were 18 breweries, including the fancy new “Philadelphia Brewery” on 2nd & Folsom:

Here’s a list of all 18 listed here along with an ad showing what the area may have looked like:

Here’s 2nd and Folsom on the 1859 Coast Survey map.  If the brewery was on 2nd, and the hill is sloping up to the left, then are we looking southwest, at the block bounded by Harrison and 3rd? Note this was the Rincon hill cut out by developers in the 1860s.

But as you might expect from a bunch of Philadelphians, the Daily Alta reported that they were dumping “offensive effluvia” all over the place:

And in one of those historical coincidences, check out the ads next to this article:

England was quite the beer shipping center, especially to India, as we can see in this report for the good ship “Edwin Fox” from 1860.

February 14, 1860
The ship sailed for Bombay. Included in the cargo was a substantial quantity of "Taylor Walker's India Pale Ale". It was to be the first of several voyages in which she carried alcoholic beverages to India and earned the name the "Booze Barge". British pale ales for the Indian Empire were made to a higher than normal strength, and given more hops, to protect them on the journey.

This is from the New Zealand Maritime record, a rather amazing collection of shipping records from the NZ National Maritime museum. (Alas the tale that IPAs had higher alcohol content to survive the journey is not true — porters and stouts also made the journey.)

But I bring you TRAGIC NEWS from the year 1869:

August 12, 1869
The [Edwin Fox] ran aground on the Coromandel Coast at 2 a.m. With assistance unavailable, the Master ordered 107 tons (446 hogsheads) of India Pale Ale jettisoned. The ship then drew herself out of the mud and reached port the next day.

That’s the equivalent of nearly THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND BOTTLES OF BEER THROWN OVERBOARD OH THE HORROR

The history of the Edwin Fox is pretty fascinating — it was built in India in 1853 and made of teak. After its days of shipping IPA to India, it served as an Australian prison ship. Afterwards, it took colonists to New Zealand and also made ports of call in San Francisco in the 1880s. The teak hull is still afloat in Picton, New Zealand today.

While we’re on the topic of ships near Picton, New Zealand (why yes, I do spend all day reading the New Zealand Maritime Record — don’t you?) there’s quite a shipwreck in the Marlborough Sounds (which is a ridiculously cool looking area as this photo by @yorrike attests):

Arial shot of the Marlborough sounds, which I took when flying out of New Zealand on Tuesday. #Aotearoa http://t.co/V2WLrctZ—
  (@Yorrike) November 24, 2011

In 1986, the Soviet cruise ship Admiral Lermontov (yes, a Soviet cruise ship) was sailing too close to shore, hit a rock, ripped a 40 foot long hole in the hull, lost power, listed and then sank. (Sound familiar?)

While the Soviet captain didn’t schettino, they were not exactly jumping to get word out there was a hole in the boat:

Presumably, because of language problems, no announcements were made to passengers to advise them of the position and tell them what to do, although many passengers were alerted to the problem by the fact that the crew were wearing life-jackets.

In the meantime there was an announcement that dinner would be delayed an hour and the wine tasting session that was in progress would be extended. The band continued to play, but the wine tasting stopped when the list sent glasses sliding off the tables.

Only one person died (a Soviet engineer below decks), and the wreck is a popular diving destination today (though three divers have gotten stuck and died within the wreck).  I do not know what sounds worse, dying on a Soviet cruise ship while it is afloat or getting stuck on one underwater.

That being said, they had quite the lounge and bar scene, as photos from the New Zealand Maritime Record report on the sinking (including a couple of before and after shots):

But even the Nevsky and Neptun bars are not enough to get me on a cruise ship.  (That and the data roaming charges.) I’d rather take a schooner to Vladivostok:

Damn the torpedoes!

And don’t forget that Russian Hill was named for Russian sailors buried well before the Gold Rush era. It’s not clear what year, or what ship, or even if the graves were moved.

1861	1862

Hittell in his 1896 History of California states that “a few graves, surmounted by black crosses and bearing Russian inscriptions” were visible as late as 1849:

I’ve found copies of Burnett and his recollections of 1849 San Francisco along with El Dorado and Taylor’s story of his trip to San Francisco in 1849 (in vol 1). Here’s Taylor’s description of Russian Hill is in volume 2 that Hittell used, but with some more detail:

(But whatever you do, DO NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK OR THIS ONE OR THIS ONE.  OR YOU WILL BE READING IT FOR THE NEXT 3 HOURS. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Burnett’s Russian Hill reference is from a poem, and other than a false lead on a name of a ship, not all that exciting.

Another reference, from 1878:

"THE CITY’S DEAD: Another spot, selected at as early a date as 1842, was the eminence between Taylor and Jones streets, and north of Vallejo street. Here were buried several of the crew of a Russian vessel, stricken with some malarian disease, which occupation of the hill by them resulted in the name of Russian hill being applied to the spot. Not many additional burials were made there, however, as it as considered too inaccessible for funeral corteges, and in 1850 it was abandoned and the remains of those placed there were afterwards removed to other localities. . ."

And I just found an 1851 reference in a proposal for new reservoirs:

The Russian Consul of SF seems to think it wasn’t entirely removed in 1860…

..The Russian cemetery that gave Russian Hill its name was located on the crest of the hill above Taylor between Green and Vallejo. The exact site is now a ramp and staircase on the corner of Jones and Vallejo. There has been much speculation as to the origins of this cemetery and why the Russian Fur Company chose this spot to bury their dead in the 1830s. The cemetery was San Francisco's second burial ground; the first was at Mission Dolores. The Russian cemetery was used during Gold Rush times, but was gone by 1860. In 1917, workmen excavating the Leavenworth Street slope are said to have found human bones there....

… and they were from a ship belonging to the Russian Fur Company (they of the Russian River and Fort Ross) rather than a warship. If so, it may be one of those listed in the ships that came to Spanish/Mexican California, with dates and ship’s master.

• 1806 – Apr 16 — Juno (Resanoff, master), SF
• 1816 – Rurick (Kotzebue); Oct 15 – Rubio, Kalzule; Sept 16 – Suvarof, Chirikof, Ermenia, SF
• 1817 – Russian Naval Officer Padushikin, in small boats
• 1823 – Buldakov
• 1824 – Buldákof (Jan 8, Aug 12)
• 1825 – Elena (Oraviof), Kiahkta
• 1826 – Argony (Inestrumo), Baikal (Benesman)
• 1827 – Baikal (Etholin), Okhotsh (D. Zarambo)
• 1828 – Kiakha
• 1829 – Kiahkta, Baikal (Benseman)
• 1831 – Baikal (Livovich)
• 1832 – Urup (Zarembo)
• 1833 – Baikal (Livovich)
• 1835 – Sitka (Basilio Wacodzy)
• 1836 – Sitka (Basil Wacoocky)
• 1837 – Baikal (Jan, Stephen Vouks), Sitka (Oct)
• 1838 – Sitka (Oct-Nov, Wacoocky)
• 1839 – Baikal, Elena (Vallivode, Sept)
• 1840 – Elena (S. Vallivade), Nikolai (Oct-Nov, Kuprianov)
• 1841 – Elena (Feb)
• 1843 – Naslednik Aleksandr (spring)
• 1844 – Naslednik Aleksandr (fall)
• 1845 – Baikal (Oct-Dec), Naslednik Alexander (Oct-Nov)
• 1847 – Naslednik (Oct)

Note that some of these visits were from the four ships built at Fort Ross — the Rumianstev (1818-1823), Buldakov (1820-1826, the Volga (1822-1827) and the Kiakhta (1824-??).

And there’s a scary amount of ship detail in Mr. Bancroft‘s footnotes in his History of California – here are the Russian ships that came to San Francisco from 1836 to 1840:

And for those of you who read Two Years Before The Mast, here are the ships that Richard Henry Dana Jr. came in and left on (1834-1836):

Note that the Russian-American Fur Company decided to leave California in 1839 and sold Fort Ross it to Captain Sutter in 1841, leaving completely in 1842. There were a couple of ships still trading along the coast after Fort Ross was shut down, including the Naslednik Aleksandr that carried I.G. Voznesenskii, a Russian scientist.

Hmmm, that narrative sounds interesting. Hey, it was by a “professional writer”! Alas all the versions I see are behind paywalls.

I initially thought a Russian ship might have buried crewmates in SF once the colony at Fort Ross was gone, but it seems as time went by the crews on Russian ships in the Pacific were mostly Finnish and “from 1840 onwards the Company’s around-the- world ships were manned entirely by Finnish merchant skippers and crew” (thus mainly Lutheran). The Naslednik was even built in Finland.

So unless there was a Russian naval ship that stopped in the 1840s that’s not in these records, I think we’re looking at one of these trading ships before 1841. This presumes of course that it wasn’t just burials from one ship. Or maybe a bunch of Finns are buried there. I can see real estate values plummeting if we have to rename it to “Finnish Hill”. (Kidding, I like the Finns, they make good goalies.)

There are surprisingly few references online to the cemetery.  The Online Archive of California lists a “Early view of Russian cemetery on Russian Hill [Vallejo and Taylor Streets]. Photograph of a painting. 1820s” (Volume 2:63) but it’s not online. Grr.

Unfortunately, there’s no sign of the cemetery in either the 1853 (top) or 1859 (bottom) Coast Survey maps (I added the red cross to show where most records seem to think it is), but regardless you can see the city starting to spread westward.

Calisphere has a couple of photos of Washerwoman’s Lagoon taken from between the two peaks of Russian Hill.  This one is supposed to have been taken in around 1866 (plus or minus 4 years) from Leavenworth and Green — if so, the graveyard site would have been a block behind the photographer (towards the slightly taller Russian Hill).

It’s hard to match up the view on the 1859 Coast survey map (remember it was surveyed in 1857, so it could have been easily 10 years out of date.  I tried estimating the field of view — I cannot match that big house with the fence, but the lay of the land seems right to me.)

This next one was taken further to the west, several years earlier (between 1859 and 1862), on the far side of the hill you see in the top photo, (the one marked as 314′ ft in the 1859 Coast Survey map) — I mainly include it because it’s cool, and if you can match up a lot of buildings on the 1859 map. I’ve tried to overlay the approximate field of view:

And that’s enough for now.  Time for an IPA.

Huge line, even at 6:30.  Get there early or your view will look like this.

Luckily I brought my iPhone zoom lens and was able to bring you blurry photos from a distance. (Do note the quality of the footage was spectacular, much better than these crappy photos suggest.)

Lots of shots of SF during WWII.

Excellent quality outtake reels of driving around SF (basically what you would see behind two people  talking in a car scene).

This film was a rather dramatic cry against anarchy:

Unsutrofied Twin Peaks:

Also some nice shots of Playland:

The running commentary was awesome, both from these guys and the peanut gallery.

Anyway, highly recommended, cannot believe I haven’t done it until now!  Another showing on January 24th, follow @footage for details. Previous editions of Lost Landscapes are available online, and I believe this one will be up soon.

It’s things like this that make me ridiculously happy to live in this town.

You might as well open a bottle of wine because you’re going to spend the rest of the night looking at these images of 1938 SAN FRANCISCO AS SEEN FROM THE SKY.

Yes, you can see the old Southern Pacific Railway trestle bridge across Dolores and 27th.

And Sears. And the old St. Lukes building.

And hey, you can see my yard — isn’t it lovely? (Sci fi time travel story: would be pretty fucking weird if you could see me sitting there.)

All hail David Rumsey, scanner of fine maps. Our friends at the SFPL had a set of aerial photos of 1938 San Francisco stashed away, and Mr. Rumsey aimed his finely tuned scanning equipment at them to drag them forward 73 years. I was lucky enough to be shown these photos in person, and they are simply remarkable.

As usual with Señor Rumsey’s work, the resolution is phenomenal — it is as good as Google Maps today. And whoever hung outside an airplane with a giant camera, crisscrossing the sky of San Francisco in August of 1938, I am drinking a beer(s) in your honor right now.

I mean, look at this: here’s the old streetcar barn that used to sit at Tiffany / Valencia / Duncan.

(I love the “San Francisco –>” sign on the roof. And yes, I need to finish the article I’ve been writing on it for the past 5 years.)

Oh, it’s Dolores Park.

(Actually not very different except for bigger palm trees.)

And hey, Seals Stadium — with a game going on!

(Sadly couldn’t have been the Mission Reds as they had moved to Hollywood the year before.)

Anyway, I’ll be diving into these of the next few rest of my lives. Let me know if you find anything interesting. There’s also an index for your viewing pleasure – once you figure out your map number it’s easiest to search for “aerial 1938 [your map number]” in the Rumsey search box.

And yes, a Google Maps layer is in the works.

Anyway, we’ve all seen the majestic glory of Old SF, who have revealed the secret history of the SFPL’s most excellent (though unfortunately lowish-resolution) photo archive.  I can’t tell you how happy I am that they took the time to geotag things.  It certainly makes my time-wasting more efficient.  (Hey, OldSFians, ping me, we need to talk about integrating the Sanborn maps!)

Geotagging these resources is but the first step.  There’s also the efforts of Historypin (who recently grabbed Jon Voss, of LookBackMaps fame) where we align photos and tag more information about them. (I cannot wait until we get a geohistory API…)

Anyway, many of you have probably seen the series of photos from the corner of 24th and Valencia from 1929.  This one looks east down 24th towards Potrero, standing next to Papalote. The building on the right (SW corner) and one across the street on the left (NE corner) are still there.

Hey, ice cream!  And we sure could use a deli on that corner again. Strangely enough, that’s a gas station across the street (where the church is now), and the Fiesta ice cream building will eventually flip to a gas station.

Another view looking south towards Bernal where you can see a lumberyard and a proto-fixie.

(If anyone wants to load these in historypin and do the before/after Google Street View thing, go for it, I’m so out of time it’s absurd.)

The Sanborn maps for this intersection are particular pain in the ass to put together — basically four different maps in two different volumes. But such is my love for you all and of history.

Anyway, here’s 1915 vs 1950 side by side. Goodbye lumberyards and the candy factory and light industry and the train station (which is a post in itself). (Click to make bigger.)

(I also did a quick and dirty map of that corner in 1899 for the 200 Yards project a while back.)

Zooming in 24th and Valencia, here’s 1915 vs 1950 in an animated GIF with a 35 year delta. The two photos were taken on the left looking right (east looking west), and top looking down (north looking south) respectively.

Click on it if nothing’s happening, or to get a wider version.

Given the title of the post, you can probably figure out where I’m going next.  The interesting thing about the 1929 photo is there are actually TWO of them, taken less than a minute apart. It’s as if the photographer knew that we would use a format invented in 1987 to animate his 82 year old images!   The detail in any one of these photos is impressive, but the animation below makes it that much more real.

(Click for a 1000 pixel wide version).

Note the kids hamming it up. They’re in their 90s now.

And check out the streetcar under the Fiesta Ice Cream sign! I never noticed it until I made this animation.

Anyway, enjoy the mildly coherent historic discourse and retina jarring animated GIFs.

The easy part is done — the maps that are left are the tough ones, where streets were renamed (or never actually existed). Bayview / Hunters Point (aka Butchertown) along with the old piers by Dogpatch will be a real challenge.

I created a cheat sheet for Butchertown which should help for the numbered and lettered “South” streets and avenues, like these:

In the late spring of 1909, a street renaming commission was appointed by Mayor Taylor to clear up the long-standing confusion from similar or duplicate street names… the chairman took a strong stand against streets named only by numbers or alphabetical letters by stating that their use “is a cheap and indefensible expedient resorted to only when imagination is lacking.”

Lettered streets were expanded into words (N St South became Newhall St.)and numeric order turned into alphabetical street names (11th Ave South became into Kirkwood, 12th Ave S. turned into La Salle). Railroad Ave (and the Long Bridge) eventually became 3rd street.

(These “South” streets and avenues shouldn’t be confused with those in the Richmond and Sunset, where J became Judah, etc – if a fog-dweller wants to generate a companion index, please let me know.)

The Great 1909 Renaming was quite controversial – there were protests in the Richmond and Sunset, and a heated debate on the use of Spanish names. From the Nov 16 1909 SF Call:

Freebooters and cutthroats, these Spanish fellows!

What do we want with Spanish names, anyhow? Why, only the other day they shot a man there for speaking out the truth, and they have been the most cruel; tyrannical race In Europe. Let’s go back to Ireland, if we must get some names imported. ‘Dinan’ and ‘Conroy’ will do better than these outlandish titles of forgotten adventurers. This Spanish business is worse than the bubonic plague, but we’ll come through it in time.

IN SESF, the Catholic church got involved with renaming the streets in Bayview / Hunters Point, leading to some rather entertaining bitching. From the SF History Encyclopedia:

Led by Father O’Sullivan of All Hallows Parish, and Father Ford, a Jesuit from St. Ignatius College, the Bayview attempted to influence the street name selection. The first contention was over the use of the name of the “patriotic” Thomas Paine, of American Revolutionary and “Age of Reason” fame. When Paine was suggested for Sixteenth Avenue, South, Father O’Sullivan protested vehemently against naming a thoroughfare after someone they branded an atheist.

The Examiner quoted O’Sullivan as saying, “[Paine] was an infidel, and in South San Francisco we are all Christians.”
The Fathers really didn’t like authors:

Father Ford protested naming Thirtieth Avenue, South as Fitzgerald Avenue: “I object to making a hero of the author of pagan literature.”

The 11/27/1909 SF Call tells the story of a pirate mistaken for a priest (Sir Francis Drake vs St. Francis of Assisi).

More SF Call articles for your perusal on the ever awesome California Digital Newspaper Collection. Consider throwing them a bone - all that scanning isn’t free.

All 700 of them. Gulp.

Fortunately, Mike Migurski of Stamen Design took pity on me and they whipped up with a crowd-sourcing interface and database to place, scale and rotate the Sanborn maps!

More details on Mike’s blog.

It’s quite fun (not to mention theraputic), and is coming along quickly. Place some maps before we run out!

Thanks again to the guys at Stamen.